Disease Characterisation Working Group

The ongoing establishment of The Global Health Network's 'COVID-19 Working Groups' aims to address the discussion and gather consensus on the emerging COVID-19 research gaps across low-resource settings. This working group is set up to work around ways to enable better disease characterisation.

Around 200 researchers from across the globe working or wanting to work in disease characterisation have come together in this group to discuss ideas, form collaborations, access funding as well as share outputs and resources that others can use. There is so much experience that can be applied here - let's use that to help this immediate need to supporting research everywhere there are cases, now!

Current work

On the 22^nd May, The Global Health Network supported the first virtual team meeting for the ‘Diseases Characterisation Open Working Group’. The meeting was organised in response to questions raised in the COVID-19 workshops which highlighted the need for greater discussion of the impact that COVID-19 pandemic might have around COVID-19 disease characterisation, specifically the implications for co-infection, immunology, etc.

After a meeting with the team leaders on the 15^th July, incorporating the comments and action points from the first meeting’s report, it was agreed that the best plan of action was write a disease characterisation protocol that can be used by any member of this WG in their respective countries and all around the world. 

A questionnaire was disseminated to all WG members to allow them to express their ideas concerning the above protocol. To build on this, the leaders held a call the 29th of July where they went through the survey results. They then incorporating these to the protocol they have developed. A first draft of the protocol and a Data Collection Form was developed by the group leaders. These were shared with the whole team and posted on this page (at the bottom) for the rest of the members to comment. Comments have been collated by August 27^th. The team got together and have reviewed the comments and incorporated suggestions from the working group.

The past months the WG team leaders has worked on finalising the protocol and the Data Collection Form has been produced as well as. These will be shared soon.

Working Documents

 Here you are able to find all the working documents from the different WGs for you to comment on;

Become a part of this Working Group

If you are interested, please register with us and we will be in touch! We look forward to hearing back from you and hope we can work together to support a strong and equitable global research response during this pandemic.

In collaboration with WHO, the ISARIC consortium have developed the Clinical Characterisation Protocol (CCP) which is designed for investigating any severe or potentially severe acute infection of public health interest.

It is a standardised protocol that enables data and biological samples to be collected rapidly in a globally-harmonised manner.

The Clinical Characterisation Protocol (CCP) can be used for the rapid, coordinated clinical investigation of confirmed cases of COVID-19.

For access to the complete set of COVID-19 Clinical Research Resources and guidance for supporting this observational CCP study at your site, please visit the ISARIC hub here.

ISARIC  |  Clinical Characterisation Protocol (CCP)   |   COVID-19 Clinical Research Resources  |  Participant Information Sheets

In addition to these resources, the following series of short video tutorials are designed to cover the overview, key steps and considerations for implementation of the CCP study by research teams globally. 

For more information and access to all of the resources and documents featured in these video tutorials, please visit the ISARIC COVID-19 Clinical Research Resources 

For any questions or queries related to these tutorials, Please contact the ISARIC Global Support Centre: ncov@isaric.org  or The Global Health Network: training@theglobalhealthnetwork.org